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<p>Agree. The preference is with the department and strengths within the department. If you come from a department in a large flagship state university with a couple of well respected number theorists and they wrote recommendations for you, you would have a higher chance of grad school admission than someone who went to an elite school also with number theorists but no recommendations. </p>
<p>A fascinating page but kind of useless is the math ancestry site. You can look up a mathematician and see who his advisor was and his doctoral students. (can’t see where they go unless they have doctoral students as well). The main problem with that is mathematicians who end up in government, industry, and LACs have their own pages but the pages are blank.</p>